Oprah (26 page)

W
HEN OPRAH
made the cover of
People
magazine on January 12, 1987, she reached the summit of cynosure status. It was her first of twelve
People
covers in twenty years, putting her in a league with Princess Diana (fifty-two covers), Julia Roberts (twenty-one covers), Michael Jackson (eighteen covers), and Elizabeth Taylor (fourteen covers). Being crowned by the celebrity chronicle made her an instant pop culture icon, and she was ecstatic. Those around her were not so pleased.

She rankled her family by talking in the article about the sexual abuse she’d suffered as a youngster, something they continued to deny. She upset child abuse victims by saying she’d found the attention pleasurable and that a lot of confusion and guilt over sexual molestation comes because “it does feel good.” She insulted her overweight sisters by saying, “Women, always black women, 300 to 400 pounds, waddle up to me, rolling down the street and say, ‘You know, people are always confusin’ me for you.’ I know when they’re coming. I say, ‘Here comes another one who thinks she looks like me.’ ” She alienated her alma mater by her “hated, hated, hated” line, referring to Tennessee State and her references about her unease when approached by anyone from her college days.

In response to her cutting comments, her family dummied up; child abuse victims fell silent; overweight black women held their tongues; and Tennessee State University rolled over, paws up, and invited her to be their commencement speaker. It was the first glimpse of the empress’s new clothes. As Oprah said years later, “In this society…nobody listens to you unless you have some bling, some money, some clout, some access.” Having acquired all of that and more, she now exerted a dizzying kind of power that compelled many people to be silent, even to genuflect, in the face of insult.

The invitation from TSU was a heavy load of bricks for some to carry. Nashville attorney Renard A. Hirsch, Sr., wrote a letter to the editor of
The Tennessean,
the city’s largest newspaper, saying he had attended school with Oprah and did not recall the anger that she claimed was rampant there. Other TSU students were also riled. Greg Carr, president of the student government, said Oprah “talked about TSU like a dog.” Roderick McDavis (Class of ’86) wrote a letter to the editor of
The Meter,
the student newspaper, saying, “Some of us worked too damn hard at TSU to have a ‘drop out’ degrade and discredit our school.” Lacking three credit hours, Oprah had never graduated from TSU.

The Meter
’s editor, Jerry Ingram, acknowledged the negative reactions Oprah had stirred. “Some people were shocked….If she said that in
People,
they wonder what she will say at commencement.”

A few students who felt Oprah was trying to ingratiate herself to white audiences with comments about “angry” blacks predicted hisses and boos when she arrived on campus. The outrage at TSU arose not simply because a black woman had demeaned a historically black college and put students on the defensive, but because it was the most famous black woman in the country reviling them in a national magazine that circulated to twenty million people. Oprah’s words were particularly wounding because TSU, beset by inadequate facilities and poor programs at the time, was undergoing a court-mandated plan to eradicate the pernicious effects of segregation that would not be completed for another nine years.

Interestingly, the university did not offer Oprah an honorary
degree, which is customary for a commencement speaker. Instead, they proffered a plaque “in recognition of excellence in television and films.” In return, Oprah asked for the college degree she had been denied in 1975. TSU agreed to give her a diploma and to graduate her with the class of 1987, if she wrote a paper to fulfill her requirements. (Apparently she did, although the university would not confirm the fact and neither would Oprah.)

Graduation day, May 2, 1987, was a dream come true for Vernon Winfrey, who finally had someone in the family with a college degree. “Even though I’ve gone on and done a few things in life,” Oprah teased in her speech, “every time I called home, my father would say, ‘When are you going to get that degree? You’re not going to amount to anything without that degree….’ So this is a special day for my dad.” She waved her diploma at Vernon, who beamed from the front row.

Oprah arrived in Nashville like a movie star. She told reporters she had flown in on a chartered jet with her entourage and was met at the airport by two gray limousines. She walked onto campus in bright yellow patent leather high heels to match the bright yellow sash on her black graduation gown. She charmed the audience with her speech—a mixture of high religious fervor and rollicking good humor. She mitigated the sting of her
People
comments by announcing plans to fund ten scholarships in her father’s name. Three months later, when she wrote the first check ($50,000), she asked the university to fly someone to Chicago to pick it up and pose with her for photographs, which she released to the Associated Press. “This donation is certainly historical for us because we haven’t had this kind of support in the past,” said Dr. Calvin O. Atchison, executive director of the TSU Foundation, acknowledging that Oprah’s donation was the largest the university had ever received.

For the next eight years she committed herself to funding the scholarships, which covered everything—room, board, books, and tuition, plus a spending allowance. She selected the scholarship winners from a list of incoming students and made sure each knew of the requirement to maintain a B average. When a couple of them let their grades slip, she wrote to them: “I understand that the first year is really
difficult and there were a lot of adjustments to be made. I believe in you. We all made an agreement that it would be a three-point average, not a 2.483 and I know you want to uphold your end of the agreement, because I intend to uphold mine.”

Her good intentions crashed in 1995 when one of the scholarship students alleged sexual harassment by Vernon Winfrey after seeking his help for additional funds. “I needed the money to take a summer microbiology class,” said Pamela D. Kennedy. “Mr. Winfrey [was] a family friend and asked me to meet him at his barbershop. I expected it to be a short meeting.”

After twenty-five minutes, she said, Vernon, sixty-two, excused himself to go to the bathroom. She claimed that when he returned he exposed himself and made an obscene gesture before grabbing her, kissing her, and begging her to touch him. “ ‘I’m doing you a favor,’ he said. ‘You need to do me a favor. Tomorrow’s my birthday and you could really make an old man happy. Come on, honey.’

“At that moment, I knew I had been set up,” she said. “He purposely had me come down to the shop when it was closed so we would be alone. Other girls might fall for his act, but I wouldn’t think of prostituting myself. I told him, ‘How dare you! I don’t care if you are Oprah’s father and can help me. I refuse to have sex with you.’ ” She said she ran from the barbershop and Vernon chased her down the street, trying to make amends. “ ‘Honey, I hope this doesn’t ruin our friendship,’ ” he said.

That same day, January 30, 1995, the twenty-eight-year-old student filed a complaint with Nashville police against Vernon, a former member of the Metro Council. The crime of indecent exposure carried a fine of up to $2,500 and a jail sentence of several months. Vernon denied the charge. “I regret the day I ever let this girl set foot in my barbershop,” he said. “Obviously she has dollar signs in her eyes.”

When the sex scandal hit the press, Oprah was silent for a day or so. Then she issued a statement, standing foursquare behind her father. “He is one of the most honorable men I know,” she said. “In his professional and personal life he has always tried to do what is right and help people.”

When the police began investigating her father, she sent lawyers
to Nashville to help him. His accuser passed a lie detector test, which was made public, but weeks later prosecutors determined there was not sufficient evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt and dropped the charges against Vernon, in large part because Ms. Kennedy’s lawyer, Frank Thompson-McLeod, had solicited a bribe, saying the charges would disappear if Vernon paid a certain amount of money. The attorney was arrested and lost his license to practice. Ms. Kennedy was not charged. “Greed is the only reason I can conclude that he did this,” said the circuit court judge after sentencing the lawyer to thirty days in jail.

“I knew, knowing God as I do, that that would happen,” Oprah said, “but I kept asking, ‘Why has this happened and what am I supposed to learn from it?’ ” The answer, she believed, was what she had been telling her father: that her wealth and fame were so immense that people would try to use him to get to her. “My father still doesn’t know who I am,” she told
Ebony,
saying Vernon did not grasp the enormity of her celebrity. “So I think something had to happen for him to see he can’t continue to be Mr. Friendly-Friendly.” She said she felt guilty “because if he didn’t have me for a daughter that could not have happened to him.” But more than guilt was her fear of what the allegation might do to him. “I was really worried about him for a while, because I thought it was going to break his spirit.”

The snakebite of the sex scandal marked the end of Oprah’s involvement with TSU and the Vernon Winfrey scholarships. “They tried everything to reconnect, but she would not come back to Nashville,” said Brooks Parker, former aide to Governor Donald K. Sundquist. “I suggested that the city’s mayor and the governor send her an invitation saying they were going to give her a special award voted by the state legislature as the Most Outstanding Tennessean, or something like that….It was planned as a citywide celebration, to take place on the campus of TSU….I asked Chris Clark, her first boss, to write her a letter, which he did, and it was a great letter. Then I wrote to her, saying, ‘The state and city are set to pay dignified homage to you.’ But she never responded.”

After sending his letter, Chris Clark, who knows how to dance
both sides of the ballroom, called Oprah’s assistant and told her to tell Oprah to ignore what he had written. “I said I wrote the damn letter because I had to and she shouldn’t pay any attention to it. She didn’t have to come home. No one else was going to get that award. It was just a publicity gimmick to get her to come to Nashville and be associated with TSU.” So Oprah declined the governor’s award.

She rarely returned to the city after that, except on occasion, to visit her father. “When she does come I send my adopted son [Thomas Walker] to pick her up at the airport in his police car,” said Vernon. “He’s with the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office.” Even on those unannounced visits, when they go out to eat catfish, Oprah is pestered for money. “We went to the cafeteria,” said Vernon’s second wife, Barbara, “and some lady slipped her a note asking for fifty thousand dollars.” Oprah ignored most requests from the city’s civic leaders for help on local projects. “No one in Nashville can get through to her,” said Paul Moore of the William Morris Agency. “Not even Tipper Gore.”

At the same time Oprah was funding scholarships at TSU, she became a benefactor of Morehouse College, a private men’s school in Atlanta, Georgia, and the alma mater of Martin Luther King, Jr. “I did that because I care about black men, I really do,” she said. “The last two movies I have been in [
The Color Purple
and
Native Son
] have not been great portrayals of black men, but I have great black men in my life, both my father and Stedman.”

After receiving an honorary doctorate from Morehouse in 1988, she established the Oprah Winfrey Endowed Scholarship Fund, to which she donated $7 million. “My dream was—when I first started making money—to pass it on and I wanted to put 100 men through Morehouse,” she said in 2004. “Right now we’re at 250 and I want to make it a thousand.” She felt she reaped far more goodwill from the men of Morehouse than she ever did from TSU.

Over the years, Oprah became a prized commencement speaker at colleges and universities, including Wesleyan, Stanford, Howard, Meharry, Wellesley, and Duke. In each speech, she cited her personal connection to the school through a friend or a relative, and she shared her beliefs about achieving greatness through service. She always
invoked the glories of God and the need to give praise. Then, at some point, she frequently descended from the lofty to the low.

When her niece Chrishaunda La’ttice Lee graduated from Wesleyan in 1998, Oprah spent part of her ten-minute speech talking about “peeing.” “All I can remember ten years later is Oprah talking about herself going to the bathroom,” said a member of the class of ’98. “Very uncommencement-like.”

At the Stanford graduation of Gayle King’s daughter, Kirby Bumpus, in 2008, Oprah quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, “Not everyone can be famous.” Then she added, “Everybody today seems to want to be famous. But fame is a trip. People follow you to the bathroom, listen to you pee. It’s just— Try to pee quietly. It doesn’t matter. They come out and say, ‘Ohmigod, it’s you. You peed.’ That’s the fame trip so I don’t know if you want that.”

A country girl with bathroom humor, Oprah liked to shock the prissy by announcing at every turn she had “to pee” or “go wee willie winkle.” Over the years she softened her rough edges and learned company manners. She mastered thank-you note etiquette and the art of the hostess gift, instructing her audiences never to arrive at someone’s home empty-handed. “Bring soaps—really good soaps,” she once advised. She thumped gum chewers and smokers, and always tipped well. She sent lavish bouquets for special occasions and never forgot her friends’ birthdays. She once spent $4 million to rent the yacht
Seabourn Pride
for a week’s cruise for two hundred guests to celebrate Maya Angelou’s seventieth birthday. But for all her social niceties, Oprah still lapsed into potty talk on occasion, and the occasions were often public ones that were supposed to be uplifting.

Some people found these restroom riffs to be funny and a part of her basic, earthy appeal, perhaps attributable to her outhouse years in Kosciusko and having had to empty the slop jar. Others found her comments coarse, jarring, and inappropriate.